Opening the Vaults – Digital Asset Management in a Museum Context

Kristy von Moos and Adele Torrance, Ingenium – Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation
In 2016, Ingenium implemented a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, with the aims of eventually organizing all media assets within the corporation (photos, video, audio), and making subsets available to the public. This presentation will discuss how Ingenium is using the DAM to promote access to archival collections, support museum activities, manage corporate digital asset use and creation (workflows, facilitating reuse), along with the challenges of undertaking such a project, both technologically and in a museum setting. Using the DAM has led us to think in a more focused way about providing access in digital space to our collections; it is part of a larger shift in approach centred on open access and digital citizenship.

Digital Collections – New Possibilities, New Challenges

Mikko Nykänen, Finnish Postal Museum
Digitizing museum collections opens new possibilities for research but at the same time it poses new challenges for museums. When planning for the digitization of collections, we need to assess carefully the possible benefits and risks. In the presentation the pros and cons of digitization will be highlighted through two current examples. First, we will look at a development-phase tool for automatic recognition of historical handwritten texts, Transkribus. Secondly we will see how data protection is an issue that needs to be taken into account especially with digital material.